Shared sacrifice? Not us!

It would go a long way to help lift the economy if some of these companies out there would just suck it up and keep more of their workers employed.
But corporate America doesn’t give a flying flip about shared sacrifice. All that stuff that President Obama was talking about in his Inauguarl Address? That’s for suckers. If their bottom line starts to dip even slightly, these companies are ready to start passing out pink slips. Let the government take care of the workers, they say, we have to watch out for our stockholders!
And so the vicious circle continues. The economy goes down. Businesses respond by cutting spending and laying off employees. And the economy goes down further.
This is why pure, unfettered capitalism is just as big of a failure as communism or socialism. None of these systems work by themselves. Capitalism is by far the best economic plan, but it needs a heavy dose of socialism and government intervention to keep from going off course and taking the country over a cliff. Unfortunately for us, Bush didn’t get around to handing the keys to the Obama administration until we had already driven off that cliff and crashed in the valley below. So it will be a long haul to pick up the pieces and get ourselves back on the road again.
In the meantime, companies that think they can weather the storm by passing out pink slips and putting their hands out for big, fat government bailout checks are going to have another thing coming.